If there is any potential left in the UK, it will be destroyed by the BBB/#NetZero agendas, because there is nothing the government and big UK capital is more determined to do than destroy creativity and independence. It may, however, be turned into a rent-seekers paradise.
If Octopus is a 'tech company', I am an Olympic swimmer.
Making apps that ration energy use is not development.
'Invention' that merely takes design briefs from flagship government policy is not R&D, but servicing politics.
The UK government in particular believes 'innovation' (pka R&D) happens because policy mandates it.
One consequence of this is that they funnel large amounts of money to the landlords of 'incubators' -- serviced offices essentially.
Another is that large amounts of money are pumped into organisations that don't really need it, to do things that the government wants... See here for e.g... ukri.org/opportunity/
An example... £12 million quid for projects that may help the government achieve its policy objective of grid storage -- which should surely exist before policy that requires it was drafted.
Firms & others will take the money, but will have nothing to show for it.
This too, you see is a desperate attempt to close the gap between policy ambition and reality.
Because the policy cart was put before the technology horse.
They could have had the R&D competition -- and feasibility and cost-benefit analyses -- before the policymaking.
Are you a woman? If not, self-define as one and have this £50K pat on the head at the taxpayers' expense.
Could you build an AI-powered robot Greta to help catalyse saving the planet through quantum technologies and digital twinning?
If you can pretend that you understand this gibberish, then the government has a £62K cheque with your name on it.
Stop Skynet becoming a humanity-destroying bastard, and you can win £81K!!!
It's so freakin' weird.
Just switch the AI off if it's such a problem.
The environmental sciences are dominated by racists, misogynists, transphobes and homophobes, that the government has set aside £400K for ideological reprogramming.
You see, this is how it works...
The ideological agenda is embedded in the funding streams.
Nobody is going to get any money for research that shows the UK govt's "economics of biodiversity" agenda is ideological bullshit.
But that *is* what's needed.
It's so desperate. It's kind of sad.
Asking 'researchers' to research 'productivity' is like asking drunks to research sobriety.
What do you think they will spend the money on?
Are you a rubbish artist?
Do an art that will only be seen by people who are already terrified of climate change and the government will give you £30,000 of other people's money.
Did you ever wonder why the BBC was so bereft of ideas?
It's because the ideas community has a direct line into the BBC ideas department.
Anyway, there are pages and pages and pages of these offers of public money for 'researchers' and companies in return for alignment with the government's agenda.
The public doesn't get anything in return for them, other than stupid policies and bloated 'research' organisations.
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People have absolutely no idea how much green energy is in the pipeline. They will all be getting subsidies -- fixed prices.
SMRs aren't going to make a blind bit of difference.
Yes -- that says 600 GW of capacity by 2040.
Yes, that is how mad the government is.
And much of that was in the pipeline before the election. The Tories are only recent acquaintances of sanity -- it's not clear that they're friends yet.
Green blob-funded lobbying organisation, Ember has produced a widely circulated report. It says that thanks to wind and solar, Britain saved around £7 million per day through March because we didn't need to burn gas.
This is a thread about why that claim is totally false.
Ember's misinformation starts as very good quality information. Ember reports gas market price data, and how this turns into a higher price for electricity from gas. It also correctly shows the effect of the Carbon Price - a policy cost, effectively tax - applied to the price.
But then it starts to get fuzzy. The report shows how rapidly green energy has been deployed over the last decade and a half.
I'm still waiting for an explanation of the Tories' part in all of this. I'm still waiting for the whip to be removed from those who were central to it.
It's no use saying "oh, we made a mistake, here are the right policies". There is nothing said in this piece that was not said 25 years ago. And it was as obvious then as it is now.
How and why was the party captured by green ideology? What agreements were made with whom? Why did the party agree to a consensus with the opposition parties? Why did the party decided to put the agenda before the public and country's needs? Why didn't it challenge a manifestly crazy ideological movement, and instead open all of its doors to it?
If you randomly threw a tennis ball in in SW1A between 2000 and 2023, the chances are it would have hit someone who would meet Claire Coutinho's description of a "dangerous fantasist". Ed Miliband is just continuity Boris Johnson.
So we need a deeper analysis.
Not so long ago... Milibandism was still the party's core offering in 2022.
"40% lower than new gas" is the new "wind power is nine times cheaper than gas".
It's DESNEZ's "on display at the bottom of a locked filing cabinet...".
It is government policy that makes "new gas" expensive.
Currently, gas is trading for 2.5p/kWh.
This new wind is 9.1p/kWh.
And that doesn't count the system costs of adding unreliables to the grid: the new wires to remote locations, the constraint payments, and the backup -- yep, gas.
These people are pathological liars and ideologues.
Gas-fired generators are extremely efficient and cheap.
The government makes them expensive by adding carbon tax to the gas, and then making the grid prefer power produced from wind than generated from gas.
The government is now leaning on green blob lobbying outfits fibs to do its dirty work.
Here's the source of one of DESNZ's dodgy claims -- that "renewables can drive down electricity prices, already having reduced wholesale electricity prices by up to a quarter".
Here is Chair of the Climate Change Committee @theCCCuk, Emma Pinchbeck, lying about why bills have gone up.
The CCC is supposed to inform Parliament. But it's literally a committee of liars.
Here's the price of gas over the last ten years. There was a spike after lockdowns, often falsely attributed to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is no way that gas prices can account for energy bills going up as much as they have.
Here is the House of Commons Library's analysis of energy prices, and again from DESNZ.
You can see that the prices of electricity and gas diverge.
This is really quite something. The BBC basically chose a Dutch millennial Monbiot, who has all the derangement syndromes -- especially Trump -- to give its annual Reith Lecture series. dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1…